How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view throughout the Museum—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, February 4), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO THE JANUARY 7 CHALLENGE:

While at MoMA, I wrote an essay for the publication Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art entitled “Mind, Body, Sculpture: Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Jackie Winsor in the 1970s.”

Artist Adam Helms in discussion with writer and curator Klaus Kertess at the January 15, 2001, Saturday Session. Photo by Brett Messenger

The first Saturday Session of 2011 took place this past weekend in the third floor Main Gallery of MoMA PS1. I organized the program and hosted the day. The afternoon featured the artist Adam Helms in discussion with writer and curator Klaus Kertess, followed by a live performance by Detroit noise blues duo STARE CASE, featuring John Olson and Nate Young.

These notes accompany the screening of Jean Renoir’s </i>La Marseillaise</a> on January 19 and 20 in Theater 3, and January 21 in Theater 2.</p>

We were scheduled to screen La Grande Illusion this week. Instead, we have substituted the film Jean Renoir (1894–1979) made next, La Marseillaise. Although unintended, this change may have a beneficial effect in that we are able to include a far less familiar movie, one that reveals some interesting things about the director, his aspirations, and his limitations.

“I went to my friend’s house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp. I turned the volume up to 10 and I hit one chord, and I said, I’m in love.” – Ace Frehly (Kiss)

“The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.” – Lou Reed

Despite several abortive attempts over the years, I never learned to play the guitar. At every turn I’ve been thwarted by laziness, a lack of dedication, and a set of 10 thumbs. This has made finding work in my chosen vocation—globe-trotting rock megastar—rather difficult.

Haegue Yang. Can Cosies. 2010. Multiple of five cans in knit covers. Publisher and fabricator: the artist, Berlin and Seoul. Edition: 5. The Museum of Modern Art

At first glance, Haegue Yang’s Can Cosies, a recent addition to MoMA’s collection, seem daintily delightful. They are soft (even squishy!) to the touch, colorful, and quirky, as seen in the knitted design of the sleeves. But pick one up and peek under the cover and you are instantly reminded of the mundane object in the work’s title—they’re really cans of tomatoes.

“I like boring things.” – Andy Warhol

As we prepared for the Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures exhibition, we struggled with how to create an online experience for the exhibition. Our colleagues in Graphic Design came up with a simple and elegant idea: a site where people could submit their own “screen tests” in the style of Warhol’s iconic works, and view others’ submissions. The site is live at MoMA.org/screentests.

You Only Live Once. 1937. USA. Directed by Fritz Lang

These notes accompany the screening of Fritz Lang’s </i>You Only Live Once</a> on January 12, 13, and 14 in Theater 3.</p>

The American-made films of Viennese-born Fritz Lang (1890–1976) will be the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at New York City’s Film Forum from January 28 through February 10. A number of his German classics appear in our own Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares exhibition, and a restored Metropolis (1926) recently had a run at Manhattan’s largest movie house. So it would be hard to argue that Lang is a forgotten director.

Xavier Le Roy. Still from Self Unfinished. 1998. Photo © Katrin Schoof

There’s a long history of dance and performance both inspiring and being influenced by the visual arts. The current MoMA exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, on view on the sixth floor, is full of examples of artists trying to capture dancers’ moving bodies in drawings, paintings and sculpture, as well as documenting them on film. If a line is the trace of a point in motion—an idea at the heart of On Line—then a human figure moving through space can be seen as a drawing in air, an insertion of drawing into the time and three-dimensional space of our lived world.

How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition in the second floor Contemporary Galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, January 21), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO THE DECEMBER 17 CHALLENGE: